Future of Btrfs Secured

Following the news of Oracle's purchase of Sun, we hear a lot about MySQL, OpenOffice and VirtualBox. But Btrfs vs. ZFS is yet another highlight of the takeover.

Many see the free Btrfs filesystem as the successor to ZFS for Linux. ZFS is quite convincing as Sun's showcase filesystem because of its scalability and countless features. Up to now a Linux port didn't exist due to licensing reasons, although it was possible to use Fuse for ZFS under Linux.

Btrfs is being developed by Chris Mason at Oracle. After Oracle's buyout of Sun, they could have come up with the idea of abandoning Btrfs development and porting ZFS to Linux instead. That, of course, is unlikely. As Mason explained on the linux-btrfs mailing list about the Oracle purchase, "This does not change Oracle's plans for Btrfs at all, and Btrfs is still a key project for us."

Mason suggests mailing list members continue their contributions and testing for Btrfs. Despite many negative replies of wanting a more stable ZFS instead of a Btrfs "under heavy development," list members agreed that Btrfs had a big advantage in already being in the kernel (see our coverage of Kernel 2.6.29). It would take years, they said, to iron out the technical and legal issues to get ZFS into the kernel. Even Red Hat's Ric Wheeler gave Btrfs his team's support.

Comments

Future of Btrfs Secured

Eliana Huizinga

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